Assail got home about half an hour before dawn. Parking his Range Rover in the garage, he had to wait until the door went down to get out.
He had always considered himself an intellectual - and not in the glymera sense of the word, where one sat tall with self-importance and pontificated about literature, philosophy, or spiritual matters. It was more that there was little in life he could not apply his reasoning to and understand in its totality.
What in the hell had that woman done at Benloise's?
Clearly, she was a professional, with both the proper equipment and know-how, and a practiced approach to infiltration. He also suspected she'd either gotten plans to the house or had been in there previously. So efficient. So decisive. And he was qualified to judge: He'd followed her the whole time she'd been inside, ghosting through the window she'd opened, sticking to the shadows.
Tracking her from behind.
But this he did not understand: What kind of thief went to the trouble of breaking into a secured house, finding a safe, burning it open, and discovering plenty of portable wealth to lift...but didn't take anything? Because he'd seen full well what she'd had access to; as soon as she'd left the study, he'd hung back, freed the shelving section as she had done, and used his own penlight to glance in the safe.
Just to find out what, if anything, she'd left behind.
When he'd come back out into the house proper, avoiding any pools of light, he'd watched as she'd stood for a moment in the front hall, hands on her hips, head rotating slowly, as if she were considering her options.
And then she'd gone over to what had to be a Degas...and pivoted the statue only an inch or so to the left.
It made no sense.
Now, it was possible that she'd gone into the safe looking for something specific that was not in fact there. A ring, a bauble, a necklace. A computer chip, a SanDisk, a document like a last will and testament or an insurance policy. But the delay in the hall had not been characteristic of her previous alacrity...and then she'd moved the statue?
The only explanation was that it had to be a deliberate violation of Benloise's property.
The problem was, when it came to vendettas against inanimate objects, it was hard to find much significance in her actions. Knock the statue over, then. Take the damn thing. Spray-paint it with obscenities. Beat it with a crowbar so it was ruined. But a minuscule turn that was barely noticeable?
The only conclusion he could draw was that it was a kind of message. And he didn't like that at all.
It suggested she might know Benloise personally.
Assail opened the driver's-side door -
"Oh, God," he hissed, recoiling.
"We were wondering how long you were going to stay in there."
As the dry voice drifted over, Assail got out and looked around the five-car garage in distaste. The stench was somewhere between three-day-old roadkill, spoiled mayonnaise, and denatured cheap perfume.
"Is that what I think it is?" he asked the cousins, who were standing in the doorway from the mudroom.
Thank the Scribe Virgin, they came forward and closed the way into the house - or that hideous smell was going to flood the interior.
"It's your drug dealers. Well, part of them, at any rate."
What. The. Hell.
Assail's long strides took him in the direction Ehric was pointing to - the far corner, where there were three dark green plastic bags thrown in a heap without care. Getting down on his haunches, he loosened the yellow tie of one, yanked apart the neck, and...
Met the sightless eyes of a human male he recognized.
The still-animated head had been severed cleanly from the spine about three inches below the jawline, and had oriented itself so that it could look out of its loosey-goosey coffin. The dark hair and ruddy skin were marked with black, glossy blood, and if the smell had been bad over by the car, up close and personal it made his eyes water and his throat tighten in protest.
Not that he cared.
He opened the other two bags and, using the Hefty plastic as a skin barrier, rolled the other heads into the same position.
Then he sat back and stared at the three of them, watching those mouths gape impotently for air.
"Tell me what happened," he said darkly.
"We showed up at the prearranged meeting place."
"Skating rink, waterfront park, or under the bridge."
"The bridge. We arrived" - Ehric motioned to his twin, who stood silent and watchful beside him - "on time with the product. About five minutes later, the three of them showed up."
"As lessers."
"They had the money. They were ready to make the transaction."
Assail whipped his head around. "They didn't come to attack you?"
"No, but we didn't figure that out until it was too late." Ehric shrugged. "They were slayers who came out of nowhere. We didn't know how many of them there were, and we were not taking any chances. It wasn't until we searched the bodies, and found the correct amount of money, that we realized they'd just come to do the deal."
Lessers in the trade? This was a new one. "Did you stab the bodies?"
"We took the heads and hid what was left. The money was in a backpack on that one on the left, and naturally, we brought the cash home."
"Phones?"
"Got them."
Assail started to slide a cigar out, but then didn't want to waste the taste. Reclosing the bags, he rose up from the carnage. "You are certain they were not aggressive?"
"They were ill-equipped to defend themselves."
"Being badly armed does not mean they weren't there to kill you."
"Why bring the money?"
"They could have been dealing elsewhere."
"As I said, it was in the correct amount and not one penny more."
Abruptly, Assail motioned for them all to proceed into the house, and oh, the relief that came with clean air. With the screens slowly descending over all the glass, and the coming dawn getting shut out, he went to the wine bar, retrieved a double magnum of Bouchard Pere et Fils, Montrachet, 2006 and popped the cork.
"Care to join me?"
"But of course."
At the circular table in the kitchen, he sat down with three glasses and the bottle. Pouring the trio, he shared the chardonnay with his two associates.
He didn't offer the cousins any of his Cubans. Too valuable.
Fortunately, cigarettes made an appearance and then they all sat together, smoking and taking hits of bliss off the knife edge of his Baccarat.
"No aggression from those slayers," he murmured, leaning his head back and puffing upward, the blue smoke rising above his head.
"And the exact amount."
After a long moment, he returned his eyes to level. "Is it possible the Lessening Society is looking to get into my business?"
Xcor sat in candlelight, alone.
The warehouse was quiet, his soldiers yet to come home, no humans or Shadows or anything walking above him. The air was cold; same with the concrete beneath him. Darkness was all around, except for the shallow pool of golden illumination he sat at the outer rim of.
Some thought in the back of his mind pointed out that it was getting dangerously close to dawn. There was something else, too, something he should have remembered.
But there was no chance of anything getting through his haze.
With his eyes focused on the single flame before him, he replayed the night over and over again.
To say that he had found the Brotherhood's location was mayhap a stretch of the truth - but not a total fallacy. He'd been following that Mercedes out into the countryside incremental mile by incremental mile, with no real plan of what he could or should do when it stopped...when from out of nowhere, the signal of his blood in his Chosen's body had not just been lost, but wildly redirected - sure as a ball thrown against a wall sharply changed its trajectory.
Confused, he had scrambled about, dematerializing this way, that way, up and back - as all the while, a strange feeling of dread came over him, like his skin was an antenna for danger and it was warning of imminent harm. Backing off, he had found himself at the base of a mountain, the contours of which registered, even in the bright, clear moonlight, as fuzzy, indistinct, unclear.
This had to be where they stayed.
Mayhap up at the top. Mayhap down the far side.
There was no other explanation - after all, the Brotherhood lived with the king to protect him...so undoubtedly, they would take precautions the likes of which no one else would, and perhaps have at their disposal technologies as well as mystical provisions that were otherwise unavailable.
Frantic, he had circled the vicinity, going around the base of that mountain a number of times, sensing nothing but the refraction of her signal and that strange dread. His ultimate conclusion was that she had to be somewhere in that vast, thick acreage: He would have sensed her traveling beyond it, in any direction, if she had come out on another side, and it seemed reasonable to assume that if she had gone to her sacred temple, upon some alternate plane of existence, or - Fates forbid - died, the resonant echoing of himself would have disappeared.
His Chosen was there somewhere.
Returning to the warehouse, to the present, to where he was now, Xcor rubbed his palms back and forth slowly, the rasping of the calluses rising up into the quiet. Over on the left, on the edge of the candlelight, his weapons were laid out one by one, the daggers, the guns, and his beloved scythe carefully arranged next to the messy pile of outer clothing he'd removed as soon as he'd chosen this particular spot on the floor.
He focused upon his scythe and waited for her to talk to him: She often did that, her blood-thirsty ways in lockstep with the aggression that flowed in his veins and defined his thoughts and motivated his actions.
He waited for her to tell him to attack the Brotherhood where they lay. Where their females were. Where their young slept.
The silence was worrisome.
Indeed, his arrival in the New World had been predicated upon a desire to gain power, and the biggest, boldest expression of that drive was overthrowing the throne - so, naturally, that was the course he had chosen. And he was making headway. The assassination attempt in the fall, which had without a doubt put death sentences upon his and his soldiers' heads, had been a tactical move that had very nearly finished the whole war before it had gotten started. And his ongoing efforts with Elan and the glymera were promoting his agenda and shoring up his support in and among the aristocracy.
But what he had learned this night...
Fates, nearly a year's worth of work and sacrifice and planning and fighting paled in comparison to what he had discovered this night.
If his hunch was correct - and how could it not be? - all he had to do was marshal his soldiers and begin a siege as soon as night fell. The battle would be epic, and the Brotherhood and First Family's home permanently compromised no matter the outcome.
It would be a conflict for the history books - after all, the last time the royal homestead had been hit had been when Wrath's sire and mahmen had been slaughtered before his transition.
History repeating itself.
And he and his soldiers had a serious advantage that those slayers back then had not possessed: The Brotherhood now had several bonded members. In fact, he believed they were all bonded - and that was going to split those males' attentions and loyalties as nothing else could. Although their primary directive as the personal guard of the king was to protect Wrath, their very cores would be torn, and even the strongest fighter with the best of weapons could be weakened if his priorities were in two places.
Moreover, if Xcor or one of his males could get hold of even one of those shellans, the Brotherhood would fold - because the other thing that was true of them was that the pain of their Brothers was agony of their own.
One female of any of theirs would be all that was required, the ultimate weapon.
He knew it in his soul.
Sitting in the candlelight, Xcor rubbed his dagger hand against his other palm, back and forth, back and forth.
One female.
That was all he needed.
And he would be able to claim not only his own mate...but the throne.
